Prime Minister Justin Trudeau maintains his government was “well co-ordinated” with intelligence allies on responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, despite some criticism that Ottawa’s reaction to the virus was an early warning failure.

“We had meetings of the Incident Response Group as of late January to talk about the COVID-19 potential threat,” Trudeau said in front of Rideau Cottage on Tuesday.

“We were well co-ordinated with our Five Eyes allies and other intelligence services around the world and being aware of this potential challenge on the horizon, and were dealing with it as of the end of January.”

But, Wesley Wark, a security and intelligence expert, said Ottawa didn’t adhere to a call to beef up Canada’s intelligence apparatus to do reporting on global pandemics in the wake of the SARS epidemic in 2004.

“In other words we didn’t use our intelligence resources at all to try and collect information on this global pandemic. So we had no chance in Canada to do some possible early warning on the basis of intelligence reports,” Wark said.

Nearly 20 per cent of Ontario households reported in a new survey that a member of their home displayed a symptom of COVID-19 this week, though only eight per cent reported a cough, fever or shortness of breath — identified as key symptoms of the virus.

Only two per cent of the 5,045 Ontario respondents in the joint survey from polling firms Forum Research and Mainstreet Research — conducted between April 11 and 12 — said someone in their household has been tested for COVID-19, though that number rises to five per cent of households with a member showing symptoms this week and 10 per cent of households with a member showing one of the three “key” symptoms.

While more than one million jobs were lost in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, last week’s labour market survey from Statistics Canada shows that the natural resources sector saw positive job growth.

But experts are warning not to read too much into the monthly addition of 5,600 jobs, which bucks trends facing the sector that includes oil and gas extraction, forestry, fishing, mining and quarrying.

The survey shows Alberta, home to Canada’s oil patch, saw an increase of 8,700 jobs in the sector, which offset 2,200 sectoral job losses in Ontario and 1,400 in Saskatchewan.

However, Statistics Canada economist Bertrand Ouellet-Léveillé said it would be wrong to read too much from the numbers. While he said he was confident the collected data is accurate, the survey only captures the labour market the week of March 15 to 21, when shutdowns across Canada were ramping up.

U.S. President Donald Trump has directed a halt to U.S. payments to the World Health Organization (WHO) pending a review of its warnings about COVID-19 and China.

Trump said at a White House news conference Tuesday that the outbreak could have been contained at its source and spared lives if the UN health agency had done a better job of investigating reports coming out of China. He also said the world depends on the WHO to work collaboratively with countries to make sure accurate information about health threats are shared in a timely manner. (Associated Press)

Police in South Africa on Tuesday fired rubber bullets and teargas in clashes with residents of the Cape Town township that were protesting the lack of access to food aid during the COVID-19 lockdown. Hundreds of angry residents fought running battles with the police, throwing rocks and setting up barricades on the streets with burning tires in Mitchells Plain. (Agence France Presse)

Researchers at Harvard’s prestigious Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health say a strategy of prolonged or intermittent social distancing may be needed for the next two years to stem the spread of COVID-19. Their research, published Tuesday in the journal Science, suggests that while one-time social distancing may suppress the number of critically ill patients, infections will resurge once these measures are lifted, leading to overwhelmed hospitals.

Despite the immense social and economic toll, lifting and re-imposing restrictions such as school, business and event closures will create smaller outbreaks of illness that can be better managed by hospitals, saving lives, they said. (San Jose Mercury News)

Cartoon of the Day

Theo Moudakis cartoon

The Kicker

In what is surely a controversial decision, COVID-19 patients in Chile who have died are being counted among the country’s recovered population because they are “no longer contagious,” Chile’s Health Minister Jaime Mañalich said this week.